Create Something Substantial

The underlining thinking is you don’t ask for it, but give it away for free. By being useful you aren’t just offering good information (like everyone else) but trying to stand out as almost necessary.

You can do this for your target fans. Find out what their problems are, and give them solutions. And, the more you can think outside the box, the better.

In his book, he offers several instances of Youtility, but I’ve got a few ideas of my own.

Free Guides- As marketers, we’ve done a great job of giving away free guides for a variety of topics. But are these guides truly helping the visitor? Or is it just a guide that solidifies your expertise?

For instance, Jon Morrow gives away a guide on his blog that helps you develop blog titles for your blog and thus drive traffic and social shares. Implementing the headlines makes a huge difference in the traffic and retweets for every post I’ve seen it used on, and the guide is FREE! 52 Headline Templates that literally triple traffic and he GIVES it away.

Applications- WebMD probably has the most used application for health symptoms than any other website on the internet. It’s been featured on television episodes, and people use it everyday. It’s useful.

There are thousands of smartphone apps that are useful, and if they hit the mark with their target user, they’ve grown over the years.

Spark People has a website that gives away diet tips, strategies and personal tracking for success. It’s just another useful tool that understands their market (like I suggest in step 1).

Give it away for free

This is the dreaded part that companies get sketchy about. After putting in months of development, thought, meetings, expertise, and man hours, the idea of simply giving something away can be painful to say the least. But, in a content crazy world, it’s necessary.

Jon Morrow, offers a guest blogging course that goes for $600 (I’m a student there). And one of the best pieces of advice I’ve heard from him was in a free webinar to teach about getting more blog traffic.

He said that people used to say create great content and it will be found and shared, but the problem today is that everyone, or at least a lot of people, are creating great content, so it’s hard to sift through everything out there and get found.

“When creating great content used to be the goal, it is now the minimum requirement. -Jon Morrow “

Delivering something spectacular is the name of the game, you have to go above and beyond. Whatever your competitors are doing, you have to outrank it. That doesn’t simply take more and incrementally better content, it takes something truly amazing that resonates with your fans.

Participate where your fans are active

Now that you have something amazing to give away, you need to let people know about it. To start with, you should start participating where your fans are, remember the places we found them in step 1?

Now you’ll write up a blog post, a press release, and start a social sharing campaign to get this awesome idea off the ground. Get ready, if all goes well, you’ll never have to ask for a like again.

Conclusion

It’s going to take time to deliver something so amazing your fans will gobble it up as soon as it is available. But, the pay off (if you succeed) is HUGE, and it is the one true way to get fans without running after articles like “How to get more fans and followers without lifting a finger”.

How about you?

Do you have any suggestions about what others could give away? Have you seen truly amazing content that has made you like a fanpage or follow someone on Twitter? Tell me about it in the comments.

P.S.- I’m working on a database that I hope will be very useful to my followers. It should be here by January!!

If you need help creating something substantial for your fans, I’d like to help. We can do a consultation and I’ll give you unique ideas for delivering something with real value.

Join The Conversation

I think the problem is we all assume everyone knows this basic piece of information about social media, so when they jump into planning, they just assume that's already accounted for, but it isn't. All along the way you should ask "How do my followers benefit from this?" because if they don't, it might be time to go back to the drawing board.

Btw, I just had the exact issue with my car battery so I thought somehow you knew me. ;)

It's so easy to forget what the driving force is behind social media when you want to see RESULTS now. We all need an occassional reminder. Glad you liked, the article, and I hope we meet up again in this crazy internet world.

I apologize for not getting back to you more quickly, I didn't receive a notification there were comments. What I would do is start with Facebook and run some monthly contests for the t-shirts- be sure to include pictures of the shirts in your regular updates. Then use Twitter to share about the company, news for cool t-shirts, etc, I suggest Twitter because it's much easier to grow a large following. Last but not least Pinterest should be great for your t's because it is a virtual network. If you need more of a walk through, contact me through my site and I'll help you out.

I'm seeing the phrase "Social Strategy" all over the web these days and plenty of posts that promise strategy but only deliver tactics. Knowing your audience, what's important to them, where they engage in the social spaces, the problems they want to solve is the first and most important step to any great social marketing strategy. Unfortunately this step is often overlooked, or simply glazed over.

All the best tactics fail when used in the wrong place or at the wrong time. If your car's battery is dead, cleaning your fuel injectors will result in nothing.

I am glad that you mentioned how important that it is for you to know your followers. This is a concept that is basic enough but sometimes technology gets in the way of knowing people directly. I am glad that you went back to the basics for the reasons why social media exists in the first place. The reason is to connect us to each other. Fantastic article. Great job.

Hi my name is jolissa, I just started my tshirt business in February of this year. I have had a total of 20 sales tops since then. I've decided to expand my business by adding a line for men and kids. I don't know much about the tshirt business, I just wanted to have another source of income. The area I live in most people are doing something similar. I promote online and i wear my product when ever im out. My problem is i dont get much views my site. I want to know better ways besides social networks because that way hasn't been working very well